Although he can knock out a pretty decent boogie-woogie on a real piano, mostly Ian produces electronic music, generally composed to accompany his poems, videos and collaborative installations. Styles range from retro R&B riffs and beats through to abstract noise compositions… Much to his surprise, Ian won the Studio Instrumental section of the SCALA 2015 Festival Of Original Music for his piece, Caza. Listen to it here.
Ian has made several sound installations as part of gallery exhibitions, including not absolute, The Microscope Project, Floribunda, and Water Under the Bridge, and public art projects, most notably, 25 Pirie Street: Heard on the Wind, commissioned by Adelaide City Council.
In 2019, Ian collaborated with Swedish-French artist and musician Frédéric Iriarte to produce Meta ‘Pataphysical Interactions, an album of Ian’s poems with Frédéric’s music, recorded in his studio just outside Stockholm. Click here to see more about the project and links to the tracks. In 2020, Frédéric and Ian collaborated on a second project, where Ian remixed Frédéric’s music tracks with his poetry, to create the album Sent From Elsewhere.
A wide selection of Ian’s music can be found on Bandcamp. Click here to explore and listen.
Microscope Music features texts from Microscope Project: How Things Work set to music constructed from samples of sounds made from the microscopes themselves. Listen to Assembly from the album here:
Listen to more microscope music here
polymag – floribunda mix was composed to accompany the exhibition of drawings by Judy Morris and poems by Ian Gibbins at the Hahndorf Academy. Listen to polymag 1.1 here:
Listen to the complete sequence here
urban biology – audiodraft features some of the poems from urban biology. Here is The Science of Shark Fishing:
Listen to more from urban biology – audiodraft here
and furthermore (indexed) samples text from the Adelaide Advertiser, which is then read by the OSX text-to-voice converter over sounds I generated from the text files themselves. Read the text in Found Poetry Review 9 and see a video version here.
Listen to more of Ian’s music on Soundcloud here and on Bandcamp here